- How the Kindle Fire Will Set the Tablet Landscape Ablaze
- Amazon Kindle Store / Music and Cloud Drive
- Apps and Games / Adding it All Up
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Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Amazon Kindle Store
The Kindle Store offers millions of eBooks, and you can download any one of them to your Kindle Fire in seconds. The Kindle Fire adds to the experience with the Kindle Fire Newsstand, a new service that offers more than 300 magazines and newspapers. Amazon has partnered with publishers to develop interactive editions that are unique to the Kindle Fire that will include multimedia content to enhance the experience on the new device.
The importance of Amazon's significant influence with content providers cannot be overstated, and the enhanced content available for the Kindle Fire is another reason why it's a game-changer in the tablet market. Magazines are nothing new for the Kindle, but until now, the reading experience has been, well, terrible. Navigation between pages and sections has been challenging, and the grayscale eInk screen simply wasn't adequate for magazines containing rich, vibrant colors. The Kindle Fire introduces Kindle users to a new world of reading non-linear content in full color.
Music and Cloud Drive
Amazon has more than 17 million songs in its MP3 store, and anything that you purchase is available immediately on the Kindle Fire and other devices. That's pretty cool, but it's not really different from what you can get on other devices such as the iPod or the iPad. However, Amazon also offers one unique and compelling service not offered by the other guys: Amazon Cloud Drive.
Amazon Cloud Drive gives anyone with an Amazon account 5GB of free online storage that can be accessed from up to eight devices. Upload a file to your Cloud Drive and it's immediately accessible from your computer, your mobile phone, your Kindle Fire, and so on.
Even better, any music that you buy from Amazon's MP3 store is automatically added to your Cloud Drive, and the space used by that music doesn't count against your 5GB of storage. (Kindle books and other Kindle content are also stored on Amazon's servers for easy access, but they aren't stored on your Cloud Drive.)
It gets better. By purchasing upgraded storage for as little as $20.00 per year for 20GB (that's not a typo), you can store all your music, whether purchased from Amazon or not, in your Cloud Drive, and the space those files use doesn't count against your Cloud Drive storage. (Files have to be either MP3 or unprotected AAC files, which include files purchased from Apple's iTunes store.) You can then play that music from the Kindle Fire or another device anywhere you can get Internet access.